Diabetes & Coffee at lunch

Drinking coffee cuts diabetes risk, but you may need to enjoy your java with lunch if you want to get any benefit.

Over a dozen studies have linked coffee drinking to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes - the type closely linked to obesity. But the mechanism behind the relationship hasn't been established and no studies have looked at whether the timing of coffee drinking influences this effect.

To investigate, researchers looked at 69,532 French women participating in a large European nutrition study. The women ranged in age from 41 to 72 years when they were enrolled in the study, and were followed for 11 years, on average.


During that time, 1,415 of them developed type 2 diabetes. Overall, those who drank at least three cups of coffee daily were 27 percent less likely to become diabetic. But when the researchers looked at the timing of coffee consumption, they found that only lunchtime coffee drinking reduced type 2 diabetes risk; women who drank more than a cup with lunch every day were 33 percent less likely to develop diabetes.

The lunchtime effect was seen only for black coffee, not for coffee with milk added, but because the number of study participants who drank coffee with milk at lunch was small, the significance of this finding isn't clear.

Lunchtime coffee benefits could have something to do with timing, or they might be related to the types of food that people eat at lunch, the researchers suggested.